The Novel ( a study of the book "L-Appartament fir-Raba' Sular )
The Protagonist is one that looks as if he has failed to integrate within a society in a self-gratifying way. The portrait is convincing. Unfinished business of the years gone by is his present bogeyman to face. In the end Samuel moves to a flat on the fourth floor of an apartment building as part exchange (wara li kien partu mal-appartament tiegħu). It is for the reader to trace the reasons and so it will be a sort of delving through a psychological thriller that fascinates.
It is said that words rise up in time to claim their inheritance and if it is done in the shape of a ghost nurtured in the mind, exorcism is resisted till the end. Samuel agonizes over faces; ponders and draws pictures of the many that make up the list of the dramatis personae when he ought to go on living and partly living the drab and dreary in a society in all its intricacies of greed and formality. For it is a fact that there is no arm to cling to, but that he must do it alone and that his relation should be to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women that he knows and calls by name.
The fresh sweet-scented flowers on the table (so opportune) and the walking stick of Samuel' s mother (again, where does it come from? ) are there waiting to greet him in the flat on the fourth floor of the apartment building. In nof defiance or passion, he has pursued with resignation a journey (in time or out of time) and now looks forward to a new life which will no longer be one of probing. The writer managed a tightly-written story which is intelligent and in certain points most appealing because it speaks about the great themes such as mother love with a freshness that is touching.
In addition the story is in touch with what there is beyond life itself as it is lived in the here and now and what there may be beyond the grave where flowers are placed every month (kull xahar). The truth is a fine thing and the energy that goes into the effort to seek is fine too. Truth may be hard to face, yet in doing so it shows grace because it is the way that man grasps knowledge.
Perhaps the novel is christian literature. God is love (Saint John in his epistles). We live and move and have our being in God (Saint Paul in the Acts).